C14 dating affirms Scripture/Scripture affirms C14 dating!

San Francisco Chronicle

A judgment about Solomon Evidence supports
Hebrew kingdoms in biblical times

David Perlman,
Chronicle Science Editor

Deep in the ruins of a Hebrew town sacked nearly 3,000
years ago by an Egyptian Pharaoh, scientists say they have
discovered new evidence for the real-life existence of the
Bible's legendary kingdoms of David and Solomon.

The evidence refutes recent claims by other researchers who
insist that the biblical monarchs were merely mythic
characters, created by scholars and scribes of antiquity who
made up the tales long after the events to buttress their own
morality lessons.

The debate, however, is not likely to subside, for
archaeology is a field notable for its lengthy quarrels among
partisans, however scientific they may be.

The latest evidence comes from Israeli and Dutch
archaeologists and physicists after seven years of digging at
a historic site called Tel Rehov. The site is in the Jordan
valley of Israel, where successive settlements rose and fell
over the centuries.

Using highly sophisticated techniques for establishing
dates through the decay rate of radioactive carbon, the
scientists have pinned down the time of a disputed moment in
history, recorded in the Bible, when a Pharaoh now known as
Shoshenq I invaded Jerusalem.

As the book of Chronicles relates in the Old Testament,
Shoshenq (the Bible called him Shishak) came "with twelve
hundred chariots and threescore thousand horsemen" and
plundered Israel's capital, as well as such towns and
fortresses as Rehov, Megiddo and Hazor.

The Pharaoh later listed those conquests on a monument in
the temple of Amun at Karnak, where the Egyptian city of Luxor
now stands.

The new timetable places Shoshenq's rampage and looting at
Rehov in the 10th century rather than the 9th, a highly
significant difference. It sets the date at about 925 B.C.,
some five years after Solomon was said to have died, and some
80 years earlier than other archaeologists maintain.

Those scholars, known in the world of archaeology as
"minimalists," insist that both David and Solomon were little
more than tribal chieftains, and certainly not the mighty
monarchs of the Bible.

A report on the new evidence appears today in the journal
Science by Hendrik Bruins, a desert researcher at Ben-Gurion
University of the Negev in Israel, Johannes van der Plicht of
the Center for Isotope Research at the University of Groningen
in the Netherlands, and Amihai Mazar of the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem, the principal archaeologist at Tel Rehov.

In a telephone interview, Mazar said that one specific
"layer of destruction" at the site yielded a harvest of
charred grain seeds and olive pits that enabled his colleagues
to date them with an unusually high level of precision. The
dates of both earlier and later layers showed clearly how the
successive layers of occupation could be determined from the
12th through the 9th centuries B.C., he said.

"They provide a precise archaeological anchor for the
united monarchies of the time of David and Solomon," Mazar
said. "The pottery we found there also tells us that the
conquest dates from the same period as Meggido, when its
mighty gates and walls and temples were also destroyed by
Shoshenq's armies."

More than 40 years ago the late Yigael Yadin, who won fame
as an army officer during Israel's war for independence,
turned to archaeology and after excavating the imposing ruins
at Megiddo maintained that they were in fact destroyed during
the so-called Solomonic period.

Recently, however, a group of archaeologists led by Israel
Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University working at Megiddo has
insisted that the so-called Solomon's gate there dates from a
much later time -- perhaps 100 or even 200 years after
Solomon.

Finkelstein read a copy of the Mazar report that was sent
him by e-mail. After replying that Mazar "is a fine scholar,"
he insisted that "there are many problems with his
archaeological data" and that the samples of material used for
the radiocarbon dating are at best questionable.

In the past, Finkelstein has accused Mazar of harboring a
"sentimental, somewhat romantic approach to the archaeology of
the Iron Age," according to an earlier account in Science.

On Thursday, however, one of the leaders in the archaeology
of Israel, Professor Lawrence E. Stager, who is director of
Harvard University's Semitic Museum, dismissed the claims of
Finkelstein and the other archaeologists who share his views.

"Mazar and his colleagues have now put another nail in the
coffin of Finkelstein's theories," Stager said. "There's no
question that Rehov and the other cities that Shoshenq
conquered were indeed there at the time of Solomon.

"We don't need to rely any more only on the Bible or on
Shoshenq's inscriptions at Karnak to establish that Solomon
and his kingdom really existed, because we now have the superb
evidence of the radiocarbon dates."

copied from http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/04/11/MN24970.DTL

Radio-dating backs up biblical text

An ancient waterway, described in the Bible, has been
located and radiocarbon-dated to around 700 BC1.

The half-kilometre Siloam Tunnel still carries water
from the Gihon Spring into Jerusalem's ancient city of
David. According to verses in Kings 2 and Chronicles 2
2,
it was built during the reign of the King Hezekiah -
between 727 BC and 698 BC - to protect the city's water
supply against an imminent Assyrian siege. Critics argue
that a stone inscription close to the exit dates the
tunnel at around 2 BC.

To solve the conundrum, geologist Amos Frumkin, of
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and colleagues
looked at the decay of radioactive elements - such as
carbon in plants and thorium in stalactites - in tunnel
samples.

The plaster lining the tunnel was laid down around
700 BC, says Frumkin's team. A plant trapped inside the
waterproof layer clocked in at 700-800 BC, whereas a
stalactite formed around 400 BC. "The plant must have
been growing before the tunnel was excavated; the
stalactite grew after it was excavated," explains
Frumkin.

The study "makes the tunnel's age certain", says
archaeologist Henrik Bruins of Ben-Gurion University of
the Negev, Israel. The Siloam Tunnel is now the
best-dated Iron Age biblical structure so far
identified.

The remains of buildings and structures described in
the Bible are notoriously difficult to find. Specimens
are rare, poorly preserved, hard to identify and often
troublesome to access. Says James Jones, Bishop of
Liverpool, UK: "This scientific verification of
historical details in the Bible challenges those who do
no wish to take it seriously."

Tunnel vision

The samples also help to explain how the tunnel was
built. The passage is sealed with layers of plaster, the
deepest and oldest of which is directly above the
bedrock, with no sediment between. This shows that the
plaster was applied immediately after the tunnel was
built, Frumkin says.

"It's also quite unique to find well-preserved plant
remains in plaster," says Bruins. Workers may have made
up huge quantities outside the tunnel, where the plants
could have become mixed in, and then taken it inside.

Large enough to walk inside, the Siloam Tunnel
zigzags through an ancient hill. Its carved inscription
describes how two teams of men, starting on opposite
sides of the mountain, managed to meet in the middle.
They may have followed a natural fissure in the
limestone rock, Bruin suggests.

It's quite unique to find
well-preserved plant remains in plaster

Henrik BruinsBen-Gurion
University

Unusually, the inscription does not name King
Hezekiah - other monarchs commonly boasted of their
architectural achievements in stone. The carving is six
metres inside the tunnel, so it must have been made by
lamplight.

"It wasn't meant to be seen by the public," says
Biblical historian Andrew Millard of Liverpool
University, UK. "I think it was the workmen recording
what an extraordinary feat they had
accomplished."

C14 dating of grain and olive pits at Tel Rehov supports
the Scriptual existance of these archaeological structures at the time of Biblical King Solomon,
and dating of the Siloam tunnel confirms the Biblical time frame,
if the C14 dating confirms the Scriptures it then follows that the Scriptures affirm
the C14 dating methods utilized.
SolomonKing SolomonBiblical King SolomonC-14 datingTel RehovSiloam tunnel

C14 dating of grain and olive pits at Tel Rehov supports
the Scriptual existance of these archaeological structures at the time of Biblical King Solomon,
and dating of the Siloam tunnel confirms the Biblical time frame,
if the C14 dating confirms the Scriptures it then follows that the Scriptures affirm
the C14 dating methods utilized.
SolomonKing SolomonBiblical King SolomonC-14 datingTel RehovSiloam tunnel

C14 dating of grain and olive pits at Tel Rehov supports
the Scriptual existance of these archaeological structures at the time of Biblical King Solomon,
and dating of the Siloam tunnel confirms the Biblical time frame,
if the C14 dating confirms the Scriptures it then follows that the Scriptures affirm
the C14 dating methods utilized.
SolomonKing SolomonBiblical King SolomonC-14 datingTel RehovSiloam tunnel

C14 dating of grain and olive pits at Tel Rehov supports
the Scriptual existance of these archaeological structures at the time of Biblical King Solomon,
and dating of the Siloam tunnel confirms the Biblical time frame,
if the C14 dating confirms the Scriptures it then follows that the Scriptures affirm
the C14 dating methods utilized.
SolomonKing SolomonBiblical King SolomonC-14 datingTel RehovSiloam tunnel